PHEMI Partners with Discovery to Tap into New Data Sources for Enhanced Insurance Offerings

Leading global insurer, Discovery, deploys PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse solution to unlock new insights and data-driven understanding of the links between behavior and insurance risk

PHEMI, the company delivering big data solutions with built-in privacy, governance, and enterprise-grade management, today announced a partnership with global insurer Discovery Limited that will see the PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse solution deployed by the South African-founded company. PHEMI will deliver a big data solution with built-in security, governance, and enterprise-grade management that will enable Discovery to further deliver innovative products and services.

Big data is central to Discovery and its unique business model, which uses a shared-value insurance approach to encourage positive behavior change for its clients. Understanding client behavior, often through analyzing complex big data sets, is central to developing products that incentivize people to change the very behavior that leads to lifestyle-related diseases and motor vehicle fatalities. The PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse solution allows Discovery to leverage data from new sources, including unstructured data such as website logs and inter-connected smart devices, to gain a further understanding of client behavior.

By acting on these insights, the company can now enhance business processes such as customer services, marketing, and product development. With support from PHEMI’s data science team, Discovery will draw on advanced analytics and data science to better understand client needs, and how to prioritize system and development investment to meet those needs. As Discovery develops further data types and sources, PHEMI’s flexibility and scalability will enable the company to keep up with new features as they continue to invest in their data analytics capability.

“The partnership with PHEMI holds excellent potential for Discovery. Understanding how our clients’ behavior affects their underlying risk profile is important for our ability to offer world-class products and solutions that meet their needs. Developing our data analytics capability further is therefore critical. The partnership with PHEMI also enhances our current data protection processes and supports our commitment to upholding the strongest protocols for gathering, securing and protecting personal and other data,” said Emile Stipp, Chief Actuary at Discovery.

Understanding the role big data plays in healthcare and insurance analytics has been a cornerstone in the development of the PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse solution. Today, data-driven organizations, like Discovery, are looking to curate and transform complex, non-traditional data types, such as diagnostics and treatment data, as well as customer service data previously locked in call records, web logs, and social media, into analytics-ready data.

According to Stewart Bond, director of Data Integration Software Research at IDC, “Data-driven companies today understand the benefits that can be achieved through broader utilization of data, but often face technological hurdles of ingesting and managing a wide variety of data types, as well as governance challenges with data access and the protection of individuals’ personal information. The PHEMI software solution opens a door to new inquiry, discovery and insights opportunities, by making more data available for analytics without compromising data privacy, security and compliance requirements.”

Leveraging the PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse solution, Discovery will not only unlock more value from big data, but will also find better ways to glean more insights from “newer” unstructured data sources. This will support their efforts to create further value for all stakeholders across the different Discovery businesses.

“Through the development of the PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse, our team has excelled at providing extremely complex and varied data in an analytics-ready format, while also ensuring complete privacy and governance,” said Paul Terry, CEO, PHEMI. “As a recognized, innovative leader in the insurance space, Discovery is ideally suited to leverage the PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse solution through its unique model and data-driven approach. I believe it will demonstrate how finding new data and insights can vastly improve customer service. There is no doubt that data science holds great promise and viability for organizations like Discovery.”

About Discovery LimitedDiscovery Limited is a South African-founded financial services organization that operates in the healthcare, life assurance, short-term insurance, savings and investment products and wellness markets. Founded in 1992, Discovery is guided by a clear core purpose – to make people healthier and to enhance and protect their lives. Underpinning this core purpose is the belief that through innovation, Discovery can be a powerful market disruptor and a force for social good. To pursue this goal, Discovery employs its Vitality Shared-Value Insurance model, which incentivizes healthier behavior for the benefit of clients, insurers, and society.

About PHEMI

PHEMI delivers privacy, security, governance, and enterprise-grade management for big data. Its flagship product, PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse, embeds privacy policies and enforces access privileges, and data sharing agreements at the data level, removing a critical roadblock standing in the way of enterprises that aim to become data-driven. PHEMI Central lets organizations easily access and mine any variety of data at any volume to drive insights that lower costs, improve outcomes, and allow better decisions faster. PHEMI brings both privacy and performance to big data. For more information visit //www.phemi.com/ and follow us on Twitter.